People seem to think that mistakes are a bad thing. Not at all. They’re even more necessary (in some respects) than success, as any successful person will tell you.
Of course mistakes hurt at first. They’re like a deep punch to the gut and they’re difficult to recover from.
But the awesome thing about mistakes is that, unlike success, you learn from them.
Kobe Bryant has missed more shots in NBA history than any other player, but we don’t remember the misses, we remember the great winner that he was, to the tune of five championships.
Steve Jobs (widely considered the most inspirational entrepreneur of all time) made several missteps with the Apple III, Macintosh, and the NeXT computer, but without those mistakes he wouldn’t have been able to build the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
By Daft Punk’s standards, their third album Human After All, released in 2006, was a big miss, with them choosing to focus, as the name alludes, on the more “human” elements of their sound. But it was still produced using mostly machines. It took that failure to allow them to truly understand the human element of their sound, and seven years later they released Random Access Memories, which limited the use of electric instruments, instead using actual session musicians. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Mistakes are wonderful.
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” - Bill Gates